Monday, May 3, 2010

New Commentaries: Immigration, Tea Parties, Big Gov't, and Freedom

Research Analyst Anthony Gregory on Immigration and National ID:

"At least since 9/11, the Democrats have, if anything, been even worse than the Republicans in their push for a national ID. I recall the Bush administration, very early on, dismissing this totalitarian idea, although Bush soon enough signed the Real ID Act into law, with the support of hawkish and anti-immigration conservatives. . . . If Big Brother tries to comprehensively regulate immigration, he can smash economic freedom of association. And if the state has the power to oversee our economic lives, our personal freedom will always suffer in the process."

"Big government from the Right usually involves warfare and its accompanying enhanced police powers at home, which usually severely erode the liberty Tea Partiers claim to stand for. For example, the tea sippers extended their pinkies in a salute to torture, harsh policies toward Iran, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. . . . Yet of all the causes of big government in human history, warfare is the most important."

Board Member Carlos Alberto Montaner discusses the definition of freedom:

"Freedom is fearlessly offering our affection and loyalty to the people we love, or to the groups with which we feel a kinship. Freedom is choosing without interference what we want to study, where and how we wish to live, the ideas that best reflect our vision of the social problems or the ideas that best seem to explain them. Freedom is selecting the artistic expressions that please us the most, or, conversely, rejecting them without consequences. Freedom is being able to undertake or renounce an economic activity without reporting to anyone, beyond the formalities established by law."

Research Fellow Randall Holcombe on special interests and big government:

"Even as new financial regulations are being written, they are being designed to benefit a few powerful interests at the expense of smaller competitors, and of the general public. Meanwhile, they ignore the underlying causes of the problem that allegedly prompted the call for regulation. Ultimately, the ideology of government economic planning is driving this reform, which completely ignores the sources of the recent problems suffered by financial markets."